2023-11-19 16:29:59
Long-term care or shock therapy for a never-ending economic crisis? Argentina, tense as rarely in forty years of democracy, votes on Sunday in a presidential election that could not be more undecided, between the centrist Sergio Massa and the ultraliberal and “anti-system” Javier Milei.
Chronic three-digit inflation (143% over one year), poverty at 40% of the population despite a dense social safety net, pathological debt and a currency that is unraveling paint the landscape of the second round. That despite a very slight advantage for Milei, analysts predict “up to the vote”.
First results around 9 p.m.
Polling stations opened on Sunday at 8 a.m. (11 a.m. GMT), and will close ten hours later, for nearly 36 million Argentines called to vote. The first official results are expected from 9:00 p.m. (00:00 GMT). For Latin America’s third largest economy, it is difficult to find more antagonistic plans for the future.
On one side, Sergio Massa, 51, accomplished politician, Minister of the Economy for 16 months of a Peronist executive (center left) from which he distanced himself. And which promises a “government of national unity” and a gradual economic recovery, preserving the welfare state, central to Argentine culture.
Facing him, Javier Milei, 53, an “anarcho-capitalist” economist as he describes himself, a TV polemicist who entered politics two years ago. Defiant against the “parasitic caste”, he is determined to “cut apart” the “enemy state” and to dollarize the economy. For him, climate change is a “cycle”, not the responsibility of man.
Argentinians “on the verge of a nervous breakdown”
Between ? Argentinians going “from crisis to crisis, and on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” summarizes Ana Iparraguirre, analyst at the opinion firm GBAO Strategies. Exhausted by prices that climb from month to month, even from week to week, when wages fall, including the minimum wage at 146,000 pesos (400 dollars).
Rents are out of reach for many and mothers are resorting to barter, as after the traumatic economic crisis of 2001. 68% of young people aged 18 to 29 would emigrate if they could, according to a University study from Buenos Aires at the start of the year. “What exists today does not work for me, so perhaps this change would be good,” says Matias Esoukourian, a 19-year-old student attracted by Milei and his “passion”, in the absence of “political experience”.
“Neither candidate has good proposals. So I vote for the one who will do the least harm to the country, which is already in bad shape,” resigned Laura Coleman, a 25-year-old nurse in an office in Montserrat, in the center of Buenos Aires. To decide between Massa (37% in the first round) and Milei (30%), the undecided, around 10% according to estimates, hold the key.
“Less support than rejection”
Milei won a “bronca” (angry) vote in the first round, but his rhetoric, his desire to dry up public spending in a country where 51% of Argentines receive social assistance, or his project to “deregulate the market for guns,” were also frightened. Also, the “anti-system” candidate modulated his speech between the two rounds. Fewer appearances, less clear-cut, and a message: “Vote without fear, because fear paralyzes and benefits the status quo.”
Therefore, “what is at stake now is less support than rejection” of the other, believes Gabriel Vommaro, political scientist at San Martin University. “It is not love that unites us, but fear,” summarizes political scientist Belen Amadeo, quoting the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The only certainty: whoever wins, there will be “rapid economic decisions that will hurt,” says Ana Iparraguirre. The country is under pressure from the budgetary rebalancing objectives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to which Argentina is painfully repaying a colossal loan of 44 billion dollars granted in 2018.
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